Just hours after being sworn in, President Donald Trump signed a flurry of orders aimed at creating a stricter immigration policy.
The administration’s efforts, which include a stop-work order for legal organizations focused on immigrants, orders to expedite deportation and a directive to send troops to the southern border, among others, have drawn criticism, praise and a storm of legal action.
Mekela Goehring, executive director at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, told Law Week via email that the organization had worked to prepare for the new administration prior to the inauguration.
“We began meeting internally in order to prepare for what we knew was to come: additional attacks on immigrant communities, including increased enforcement, increased immigration detention, the stripping away of due process protections, the loss of humanitarian protections like TPS, and the potential of federal funding cuts for RMIAN’s work,” Goehring said.
She noted that the work wasn’t done in isolation and that RMIAN worked with its community partners to ensure it was working collaboratively and strategically to best use resources. She said that meant that organizations like the American Friends Service Committee and the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition focused on know-your-rights presentations and sharing information. For RMIAN, the focus was on immigration legal services, both for children and families as well as individuals in immigration detention.
“We ensured our clients knew their rights, we worked to close as many cases as possible, and we filed as many pending applications as possible,” Goehring said. “We also mobilized our volunteer attorney network in preparation for the legal representation we knew would be needed.”
As part of that mobilization, RMIAN, along with the Colorado Bar Association/Continuing Legal Education, the Colorado Lawyers Committee and the Boulder County Bar Association, trained more than 100 pro bono attorneys on the Friday before Trump’s inauguration.
What’s in the New Administration’s Orders
There was no interlude period following the ending of the Biden administration. Trump signed dozens of executive orders on his first day, several of which related to immigration. In 2017, at the onset of his first presidency, it took until Jan. 25, 2017, for Trump to issue orders related to immigration.
The Trump administration’s reasoning for each of its immigration orders has been largely consistent.
In the executive orders, the administration says that this influx of immigrants threatens the country’s public safety and economic security. One cites Denver’s request for federal aid to help manage the burden of new arrivals.
Goehring said that RMIAN was worried about federal funding cuts to its work, but it was shocked with the speed that it was enacted. One of the inauguration day executive orders stopped funding for legal access programs for immigrants.
It didn’t take long for the administration’s order to take effect. Goehring said that two days after the order was signed, RMIAN received a stop work order for its Legal Orientation Program, Family Group Legal Orientation Program and Immigration Court Help Desk Program.
That stop work order was pursuant to a directive in an executive order titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” In that executive order, the Trump administration said that, “Over the last 4 years, the prior administration invited, administered, and oversaw an unprecedented flood of illegal immigration into the United States.”
It also states that many of the illegal immigrants who crossed the border are threats to both national security and public safety, and that other immigrants are engaged in hostile activities against the country.
According to the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, all immigrants, including illegal immigrants, have a lower crime rate than U.S. citizens. A related study from the National Institute of Justice that showed a similar conclusion has been taken down from the government agency’s website.
Following the stop work order, a coalition of nonprofits that included RMIAN on Jan. 31 sued to restore access to their programs. The DOJ rescinded the order two days after the suit.
The challenges confronting immigration attorneys extend beyond the stop work order. Deportations have begun, including in Colorado, where federal agents raided apartment buildings in both Denver and Aurora on Feb. 5.
The Protecting the American People Against Invasion order, in conjunction with the Securing Our Borders executive order and the recently passed Laken-Riley Act, are all part of the changes to the laws that have created the deportation actions.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the Laken Riley Act requires the federal government to detain immigrants living in the country without legal permission who are accused of theft, burglary, assaulting a law enforcement officer and any crime that causes death or serious bodily injury.
The Securing Our Borders order directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to detain to the fullest extent of the law individuals who were apprehended for violations of immigration law until their removal. It also terminated the parole programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.
Protecting the American People Against Invasion order is a wide-ranging one. Among its changes are a mandate for “efficient and expedited removal of aliens,” an order to the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security to deny “sanctuary” jurisdictions access to federal funds and an authorization for the Secretary of Homeland Security to empower state and local law enforcement officials to perform certain functions of immigration officers.
Denver’s Mayor, Mike Johnston, was called by Congress to testify and to send documents and communications related to what Rep. James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky and Chair of the Oversight Committee, calls the city’s “sanctuary policies.”
In a news release prior to the summons, Johnston outlined Denver’s immigration policies.
Those policies include some cooperation with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials, but Johnston has said that Denver police will not detain people for ICE and won’t support non-criminal immigration enforcement actions.
Some of the detainees will also be going to a location that was previously reserved for individuals the U.S. accused of terrorism, Guantanamo Bay. The Department of Defense announced that the first flight had arrived at the facility on Feb. 5.
In a press conference on Feb. 4, Trump said that the new orders and directives were getting some very dangerous people out of the country.
According to a Jan. 29 post from the U.S. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks on X, apprehensions dropped 55% from the previous week, which followed the suite of executive orders signed by Trump.
“You can see we’ve been strong, [because] we’ve had numbers like you’ve never seen before, the border is now closed, really closed,” Trump said in the same Feb. 4 press conference.
Goehring said that the legal impacts from the Trump administration’s orders and directives on immigration have been immense and devastating.
“We know our work is now more crucial than ever,” Goehring said. “The challenge will be finding ways to ensure that we have access to our clients and to individuals before the immigration courts in Colorado. And ensuring we have the funding to continue the work.”